Author Archives: Paul Silver

Fixing a download link downloading the same file when it should be dynamic

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One of my clients, the Database of Pollinator Interactions allows researchers to easily search on which insects and mammals pollinate which plants. To make it simple for researchers to gather the references to papers they need to look up, their website allows downloading of search results as a CSV file.

This is powered by a little bit of AJAX, when a searcher clicks the download button, Javascript calls on a PHP script which reads the search filters out of a cookie, compiles the results into a comma separated file, and lets you download it.

However, the site had a bug (no pun intended). If you ran a search and downloaded the results, then ran a different search and downloaded the results, you got the same file of results, even if the search was completely different and the results shown on the page were correct for the search.

This turned out to be because the live server was set up to cache pages where possible, whereas my development server was not. The call to the script that made the file was on a URL that did not change, as it read what it required from a cookie. So the browser thought it was hitting the same URL each time the download button was pressed, so to help speed things up served up the file for download from its cache, rather than requesting a new one from the website.

The fix for this was quite straightforward. In the PHP script that received the call from Javascript, I added these headers at the top of the code:

header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");

Having them all is probably overkill and I should go back and find which one really does the job for them.

This makes the script send headers when the browser requests the URL saying not to cache what is sent back. So the browser will request it fresh each time the URL is called.

Now, when the button is pressed, a new CSV is always requested rather than the browser providing the one it has already received. Problem solved.

Using Microsites for SEO purposes

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A ‘microsite’ is a small website, a business can use them for a lot of different purposes: promoting a particular event like a competition or conference, targeting a particular type of business by having a site just for them, highlighting a service that customers might be interested in but which is not the main focus of the company.

How I’ve used microsites successfully is as a way to experiment with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO has a lot of rules, some clear, others rather vague. Usually, I err on the side of being very safe when optimising for a client. I fix any technical problems, and work with copywriters like David Rosam who can write for both being found in search and convincing a visitor to become a customer simultaneously. No dodgy linking. No weird technical tricks. Straight down the line works over the long term.

However, there are times when I want to try something in the grey area where the rules are vague.

One of these situations was targeting various searches and locations. My client wants to be found for various searches which were a combination of <service> & <location>, so cleaning flats brighton. We could see these getting clicks and conversions from Google Ads searches, so wanted to see if we could get found for them in normal, ‘organic’ search results as well.

So the goal is: get found for various services in a wide range of locations.

The client already had registered a wide variety of domain names, some of which contained the service (keyword) being targeted, i.e. cleaningflats.co.uk or apartment-cleaners.net They weren’t in use, so I borrowed four to start our experiment. (To be clear: the searches and domains are just examples, my client is not a cleaning company.)

A copywriter the client already used wrote four pages of copy centred around the service and a single location, and four smaller amounts of intro copy we could use on the home page of each microsite.

I created four small websites using the same branding and navigation we used on the client’s main site. As well as the intro copy from the copywriter, each homepage listed the main locations being targeted by the client. The locations linked through to individual pages which were re-written using code and a database to have the location in the text replaced with the location that was in the link. Also, the pages showed the nearest office to the location rather than just the HQ.

Now, strictly speaking, this is against the guidelines of the big search engines. They do not like text re-written in this way as it is too repetitive across all the pages. But, they were useful pages for the people who were searching for the service in a particular location. And… they worked. Google and Bing did show the pages to searchers looking for the particular service in a particular area covered.

These are not high traffic sites. They are small – hence ‘microsite’ – and tailored to a very particular audience. Maybe this is why the search engines were happy to show them in the results.

Once a few had shown their use, the client was happy to roll out several more to target all of their top services. I added in some refinements to the sites to help the re-written pages be more useful to the people finding them, and to the whole sites to show Google we weren’t running a network of spam sites to try to influence their ranking of the client’s main website – it would have been a terrible result to have some small sites doing well in search and lose the whole of the main site from being found.

Over time, the microsites have brought thousands of extra enquiries in to the client, so have been excellent value compared to the cost of creation and maintenance.

An interesting side effect of having a main website and range of microsites is how they are affected when Google changes their ranking systems. When a big change comes through, if conversions through the main site start dropping, we often see a boost in enquiries from the microsites. By following a different path in optimising the microsites, we’ve gained a bit of resilience in riding out the big changes.

If you have an SEO experiment you wish to run, a microsite can be a great way of doing it. Re-using existing branding and navigation saves a lot of time, so you can concentrate on the content and some promotion to get the site found. You don’t even need the technology behind the microsites to be the same as your main site. Use a complicated, bespoke CMS behind the main site but want to use something simpler for your experiment? Feel free to use WordPress, or some simple static HTML pages. Anything that lets you get an experiment up and running quickly is fine.

Interested in looking at how microsites might help your business? Get in touch, I’m happy to chat about your needs.

Weeknotes 29: 22 July – 28 July 2019

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Client work

Not a lot to report, I was doing a lot of updates and bug fixes while catching up from the time lost last week due to a migraine.

For one client I had a Google Ads account review with their new “Account Strategist.” This is basically going through your account with someone at Google who is very good at Google Ads (Adwords) and them showing you things that need to be fixed or can be optimised more. It was a semi-useful experience this time as a few things I’d missed were brought up, and I have been neglecting the account we were looking at while working more on the client’s SEO recently and having limited time to do both.

Unfortunately, the new Account Strategist is one of the rather pushy ones, and here we hit a problem with the way Google runs their publicly facing staff at Google Ads. Bluntly, money talks when it comes to Google Ads. Spending a lot in their system? Get senior staff who are very meticulous. Pay less? Get a more junior, often pushy person who’s more interested in you turning on a feature that helps Google more than it helps you. Spend little? Basically get a full on pushy salesman who will try to make you turn on YouTube ads all the time, or at worst someone you can barely understand who appears to have never seen their interface before.

I was feeling rough on the day of the review and when I pushed back on doing things like writing a new advert and putting it live in the middle of the phone call (which he was late for, as is often the case for the lower down staff) he acted incredulous, and the same for me not wanting to immediately trigger changes which I know will cost the client more money for little return, as we’ve tried the same feature in the past.

I’ve been handing Google Ads for clients for a lot of years now and I’ve learnt putting things live during a call generally does not work out well for me – they are changes I haven’t properly thought through as I’m in the call rather than considering all the implications of my actions. It is always worth pushing back in these circumstances.

The attitude of their contact people reminds me a lot of the recruiters I’ve worked with – the better ones tend to listen and understand when you don’t want to be rushed and they tend to end up running high value accounts, the ones who top out in the middle of the ranks are always pushy. Fortunately Google tends to rotate all their contact staff every 6-12 months, so you don’t have to put up with the ones you don’t like for long. They rarely seem to make notes though, so you always have the same initial conversations whenever you change Strategist. I’d have thought Google would have a cracking CRM tool for the part of the business driving most of their billions in revenue, but apparently not.

My Projects

Very little on my projects as I was catching up with work that did not get done last week, and trying to not fill every minute of the day as I didn’t want to trigger another migraine.

Productivity/Health

Two things hit my productivity a lot – heat and politics. The heat I partly managed to solve by working a few days at The Skiff, where the air conditioning is brilliant and meant I could work properly. Boris Johnson becoming the new Prime Minister in waiting was a big distraction, and I’ve become so fed up with everything he says being leapt on by people on Twitter that I’m trying muting several phrases for a week. Twitter will not show any tweets containing the words you have muted, and lets you mute them for a week or more – very handy for trying things out.

I have muted “no deal”, “johnson”, “boris” and “brexit” for a week to see how it goes. So far, my timeline is a lot shorter, but also less stressful. I’m not ignoring the news, I listen to a couple of political podcasts and check news sites, but I’m doing it more when I want rather than it dominating social media when I’m interested in what my friends have been doing. I muted “farage” and “trump” a long time ago and feel I’m much better off for it.

Learning

Again, no progress on 30×500 apart from a little work on content for the Farm site.

New meet up

I went to the inaugrual Brighton Indie Hackers Coffee Meet, run by Rosie Sherry. I both like Rosie a lot and have a hell of a lot of respect for her too. She’s built her success through an enormous amount of effort, building a community where testers can get the respect they deserve.

The best bit of the meet was hearing what she’s been doing recently, which sadly has been burning out on her own project and taking a step back. I hope she can get over that quickly and find something new that she’s as happy with as she has been with MoT. One of the things she’s doing now is be community manager for Indie Hackers and they couldn’t have made a better choice for that.

The meet up has got me to try out the Indie Hackers podcast and check the site out. I hadn’t realised how big Indie Hackers had got, I was only aware of it as a site which seemed to be content marketing aimed at the Hacker News crowd, and I kind of forgot about it when my interest in HN petered out a couple of years ago. So, Rosie’s community management is going well on a very local level!

The Farm

Once again held at the Caxton Arms. Only 12 people along but summer can be very up and down as people do things with their families. My notes were…

  • Live mobile app work
  • Airflow – Apache’s batch system
  • Trying to get people on big teams to understand the consequences of actions on other projects
  • Building a local setup to match a client’s weird setup
  • Dealing with the heat
  • Creating Downs-land in town
  • Wildflowers
  • Boris Johnson
  • Affluent reactionaries
  • Moasic demographic: low horizons
  • Will there be a general election soon?
  • SD card aging
  • Long lost relatives
  • Photography with film vs digital
  • Star Trek: Picard
  • DNA testing
  • Ancestry.com and the Church of the Latter Day Saints
  • Sockmaggedon

Family

During the weekend I took Tom out to Worthing, where he enjoyed a playground and playing some Pokemon Go, and I enjoyed an American car show – lots of massive old cars I usually only see on Roadkill episodes.

Tom and old Chevy pickups

Reading: Continued Titan by John Varley. Also started Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. I’m reading Super Thinking on the train to and from The Skiff and so far I’m only a little way in and it’s… a bit disappointing. A lot of stuff I already know and a lot of repeating that the book is going to change the way I think. I’d be much happier if it got on with that changing rather than telling me it was going to do it, but I guess that is a business book kind of thing.

Writing with: a Uniball Eye Needle Fine, a good rollerball I’ve been using for my Farm notes as it’s good for using in a small notebook. Good for a big notebook too!

Writing in: a Beechmore Books A5 dotted notebook. I got this at a good price from Amazon, it has nice paper, smooth paper which is coated so fountain pen ink works well on it, although it takes a while to dry. Part of the notebook has a slight binding problem so the paper isn’t completely flat, I’ll have to wait and see if that’s a problem or whether using the earlier part will flatten it out. For £4-5 cheaper than a Leuchtturm1917 notebook, it is a very good choice.

Weeknotes 28: 15th July – 21st July 2019

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Client work

A bunch of spec writing and minor updates. Only things to talk about are…

Discovering the CSV output a client does from a download from another piece of software has started adding an Unicode code point U+FEFF BYTE order mark, more commonly referred to as a BOM character. I had to find some code to strip this off of each line so PHPs fgetcsv could parse the lines correctly.

And for the same client, something odd was coming in with the postcodes for some of the data they are using, which meant the database wanted a different collation for the table we’re looking up postcode data from. That was using latin1, it needed to match UTF8mb4.

This MySQL query will show what collation each table is using:

SELECT TABLE_CATALOG, TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, COLLATION_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS

Then I used this, with the right table name instead of database_table_name to update the one that was on latin1:

ALTER TABLE database_table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

My Projects

I managed to write and publish an article for the Farm: Downloadable Freelancers Invoice Tracking Spreadsheet and edit another one on contracting which I’m not happy with the ending of yet.

On the downside, I discovered the new account emails sent by the Farm site are often being marked as spam. In investigating, I found I’d made a minor mistake in the SPF record for the domain, so I’m hoping fixing that will solve the problem. If not, I’m going to re-write the standard email WordPress sends in the hope it will then not be seen as spam as it will be unique.

Productivity/Health

The week started OK, then went strongly downhill on Wednesday. After spending a chunk of the morning at my son’s sports day, then part of lunchtime getting hot walking to the shops and back, I got a migraine. I took my medication for them very early, then when the symptoms had gone off tried to do a bit more work as I was at The Skiff and hoping to stay on for The Farm later. This was a mistake. I started to feel worse again, got very little done, and had to go home to sleep off the rest of the effects. Result – no Farm for me, little done, and a bad migraine hangover the next day. On Friday I was still feeling washed out, so the second half of the week was poor all round.

I’m still trying to work out whether the trigger for this migraine was the heat, or a different sort of yogurt I’d had on Tuesday night. It was a brand I’ve had before, but a new sort of packaging and yogurt so I have a suspicion it was that as yogurts have been a trigger in the past. Annoying that a brand I can normally eat might have changed a supplier or recipe so I can’t be sure about them.

Learning

No progress on 30×500 apart from getting content done for the Farm site.

The Farm

No notes from me as I missed it. Haze tells me there were 22 people there before he left half way through, including several new people. Hopefully they’ll be back soon.

Family

During the week we had Tom’s sports day one day, then a get-briefed-about-year-five talk the next. I don’t think we have anything to worry about for his next year at school, although it’s easy to be smug when your child is doing well in school.

The weekend involved cutting down a bunch of branches from our neighbours tree as it’s overlapping in to our garden too much – blocking the sunlight hitting our washing line and dropping a lot on our trampoline. I haven’t cleared quite all of the branches from this yet, having filled two of the council-collection sized bags with just over half the clippings. I also checked the gutters after a rain storm showed the back ones are falling apart and leaking everywhere.

There was also two playground trips, and visiting the beaches of both Lancing and Worthing.

Reading: Continued Titan by John Varley. I feel a bit more could be happening but actually, quite a lot is it’s just not as overly dramatic as some more recently written fiction.

Writing with: back to the OHTO Capsule Multipen I was using at the start of the year. Really good in the not-great paper of the Notables notebook I’m just about to finish.

Weeknotes 27: 8th July – 14th July 2019

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Client work

There were some bread and butter bug fixes and changes to parts of some client sites, but the week was dominated by domain transfers.

For one of my long term clients I’d ended up with a dozen of their domains in my domain registrar account, mainly .co domains as their registrar did not support them when they first came out. These are expensive domains to rent and I’d complained about having to renew them each year then have to wait to be paid back. Another freelancer involved with the company also had some domains in his registrar too. So, I was asked to transfer all of them over to the now updated client’s Ionos (previously 1&1) account.

This was relatively straightforward, being mainly clicking around various bits of multiple web based control panels. But it took a while as there were 30 or so domains to move, and the process is slightly different for .uk domains compared to everything else.

It took a few days for the .co domains to move, and when domains move their DNS disappears so I had to re-set up each domain to point to the client’s server. Again, not tricky once you know how, just a lot of clicking and keeping track of what’s transferred and set up and what hasn’t.

I don’t transfer domains very often and the process seemed easier than when I’ve done it in the past – you need various codes and things, but both registrars had simple procedures for them and weren’t trying to hide anything.

My Projects

I managed quite a lot of writing for the Farm site, with one article going live on How to make a freelancers invoice and chunks of several others written or in notes form.

Also on the cards was an upgrade to the WordPress install that the Farm site runs on. Haze, who built this version of the site, offered to be around when I did the upgrade just in case anything went wrong, but I did it without him and nothing did. We had a little stutter on some pages as I hadn’t realised the Advanced Content Fields plugin needed a button pressed to update the database, but that was it. All very smooth and a testiment to Haze’s site building skills.

Productivity

Pretty good to start the week, then got lower near the end after a bad night and low motivation due to having to chase money, again, from one of my clients.

Being cheesed off by the money chasing provided some useful motivation for getting on with the content for the Farm site, and pushing towards finding something to earn income outside of client consultancy work.

Learning

Some progress on 30×500, continuing to learn about the slightly more advanced parts of the content marketing they suggest.

The Farm

Attendance down at 14, but the chat was very good. As usual it was at the Caxton Arms. My notes were…

  • Tomato plant horticulture
  • Finding out if your potential app has a market
  • Problems buying/selling houses
  • Vue.js
  • Lobsters regrow their claws
  • Domain moving
  • Greenfield projects let you use new tech easily
  • Learning a new tech properly by doing a project with it
  • Carsitting
  • Getting plumbing fixed
  • The Skiff coworking space
  • New to freelancing
  • Revolt Bitcoin wallet
  • To do app for chidlren’s chores
  • Refactoring and fixing a large Backbone project
  • The Farm acting as an old boys network
  • Diving
  • GraphQL / Grapher
  • Scala and Slick functional relationship mapper
  • Worthing Wheel
  • Kevin’s found skull fragment resolved
  • Strange finds (including exuviae)
  • Finding time for your own projects

Family

Nothing unusual, just the standard playground and family visits.

Reading: Started Titan by John Varley, which I hadn’t taken in was part of a series. Started well, not a lot to report as I’m not making great progress as I’m falling asleep so fast at the moment.

Writing with: a Zebra Z-mulsion pen, nice and smooth but a little smeary if you’re not careful with it.